Q-Bitz: Visual Dexterity, Cubed.

I would like to admit, right off the bat, that I didn’t make up that nifty headline.  I stole it from Mindware, the publisher of Q-Bitz, who used it as the tagline for the game.  It’s a clever little statement, which describes a fun little game.

Q-Bitz is a game for 2 to 4 players.  It’s not so much a strategy game as it is a race to see, solve, and replicate patterns on the 120 different Q-Bitz cards.  The twist comes in that the game is played in sets of three rounds, and each round calls upon different, if allied, skill sets.  In the first round, players race to recreate the pattern on the randomly-chosen card, rotating their sets of cubes as necessary.  The first player to complete the task wins the card.  So far, so good.

The second round, however, introduces an element of luck.  Each player rolls his cubes like dice and uses as many as possible to recreate elements of the pattern card.  Those cubes whose faces cannot be used are re-rolled, and so on.  Again, it’s a race — the first person who manages to roll all the necessary faces, wins the card.

The third round calls upon players’ memory skills.  They study the pattern card (again, randomly chosen) for 10 seconds, after which it is turned over and players compete to see who can complete the pattern from memory.  The player who first completes the pattern — or who at least has most segments — wins the card.

The game rewards visual discrimination, memory, and pattern-matching skills.  There is no strategy involved, since in any round it’s always ultimately a race to win the card. It’s a fun, quick game to play with children aged 7 or 8 and up.  Contains 12 cards, 4 wooden trys, 4 sets of 16 cubes, and rules in English, French, and Spanish.

CAD$29.99  In stock now.

The Box Girls Big (and Mini!) Box of Questions

Box Girls "Take Out" Family Dinner Box of Questions

We’ve just been unpacking a monster order from the inventive folks at Melissa & Doug.  Although they got their start in the wooden-puzzle-and-building-blocks end of the toy business, M&D  has been expanding its catalogue to include such things as dress-up clothes, puppets, pretend play furniture and accessories, and ride-on toys (see the post on Trunki here).  Among the new items featured in this year’s Melissa & Doug catalogue are a great series of games called the Box Girls Box of Questions and Mini Box of Questions.

Each size is available in a number of themes, ranging from holiday-related games (Chanukah and Christmas) to B(est) F(riends) F(orever), Family Dinner, Slumber Party, and Birthday Girl.  The games are packaged in neat cylindrical boxes, with the large games including 82 question cards and the small games containing 42.  The games are designed to be conversation starters, helping kids, friends, and families to know one another better.

The company was started in 2002 by two harassed moms, Cece Feiler and Heidi Haddad, who were trying to keep impatient children — and husbands! — from melting down during a restaurant outing.  Since that time, over half-a-million games have been sold, and reviewers have been unanimous in their praise for the game’s ability to bring together families and friends.

Box Girls Box of Questions (assorted) CAD$11.99

Box Girls Mini Box of Questions (assorted) CAD$5.99

In stock now.

Game Review: 7 Wonders

7 Wonders, Winner of the 2011 Kennerspiel des Jahres

Just announced today is the winner of the highly-anticipated German game award Kennerspiel des Jahres (“Connoisseur’s Game of the Year” is a rough translation of the award’s name) for 2011:   the addictive 7 Wonders from Repos Production.

7 Wonders is designed for 2 to 7 players, and takes only about 30 minutes to play.  It is suggested for ages 13 and up.

The game uses a card-drafting mechanic, in which players pick cards from a pool in order to fill out their hands and meet some game objective (another game using this mechanic would be Days of Wonder’s classic rail game Ticket to Ride, for example).  There are three decks of cards, each labelled I, II, or III, and corresponding to the three “Ages” or phases of the game.  Each player gets seven cards from Age I, and a randomly-chosen Wonder board.  The various Wonders have various strategic strengths and weaknesses, and each could be considered to impose a particular style of play on its holder.  Each Wonder possesses a singular resource, for example, that its holder acquires for free on each turn, and can use or sell to other players.

The deck of 49 cards for each Age is divided into:

1. Resource cards (brown) – these have a one-time cost, and allow players to harvest the appropriate resource once per turn.
2. Military (red) – players compete to have the most powerful military installation at the end of each Age; the most powerful gains a military point, while the weaker players actually gain negative points (not a good thing).
3. Material (grey) – these provide non-constructed goods that become necessary in order to build higher-level buildings.
4. Victory (blue) – these cards provide victory points, and may allow construction of more advanced buildings in subsequent Ages.
5. Technology (green) – building various technologies through collecting sets of cards provides bonus points.
6. Trading (gold) – enable players to obtain advantageous trading relationships with players to left and right.
7. Guild (purple) – only available in Age III, which confer victory points through various strategies.

The rules and game mechanic are pretty simple, but — as in all great games — to win requires a combination of luck and sound strategy.  7 Wonders requires that players make all sorts of decisions, and few decisions are straightforward (most are agonizing).  The game is designed to be short enough in duration that you can play “just once more” without stretching your games night into the wee hours of the next morning.

7 Wonders seems destined to be a classic.

In stock now.  CAD$54.99

Settlers of Catan 15th Anniversary Edition

Just arrived in the store is one copy of the special Limited Edition Settlers of Catan 15th Anniversary Box.

This very handsome set includes all-wooden hexes and playing pieces, as well as 154 cards with artwork designed by acclaimed graphic artist Michael Menzel (check out his website here).  The set actually comprises both the core game plus the 5-6 expansion, all packed into a beautiful wooden box with a brass clasp.

What a lovely gift for a special gamer!  (And if no one buys it, guess what I’m getting for Christmas?  But don’t let that stop you.)

CAD$149.99  In stock now, one only.

Crokinole Boards are Back!

After much nail-biting and worrying about whether or not they’d actually make it here in time for Christmas, we’re happy to report that our final shipment of crokinole boards for 2010 has arrived in the store.

The price remains at CAD$44.99, which is a pretty good deal for untold hours of traditional gaming fun.  We’ve also received a large supply of replacement crokinole discs (CAD$9.99 for a package of 24.)

This year’s supply, by the way, actually is the 2-in-1 game as shown, rather than the 3-in-1 game we stocked last year (the difference being that this one only has the chess/checkers board on the reverse side, rather than chess, checkers, and backgammon.)

Anyone who wishes to refresh their memory as to the basics of the game and  its history may click on this link to a Scalliwag blog post from last December (game geeks, you know who you are).

 

Do You Say Redneck Like It’s a Bad Thing?

Redneck Life

New in stock from Gut Bustin’ Games is Redneck Life, a very funny party game.  Roll-and-move game mechanics make it easy to play — a roll of two dice determines the grade you complete in school, which in turn sets you up for one of 11 careers (I feel personally closest to the “Flea Market Merchant”, myself).  Redneck Life takes you on a journey through Blue Collar life, using credit to buy vehicles, getting married, buying a (trailer) home, and raising a passel of young’ens.

Oh, and the winning condition?  The player-character with the most teeth at the end of the game wins!

2-6 players, best with 4.  In stock now.  CAD$35.99

An Old-Fashioned Winter

Deep Drifts in the Snowbelt

Parts of South-western Ontario have been taking a pounding from winter storms over the past few days.  London, a city of about 400,000, has received almost 100 cm (about 37 inches) of snow since last weekend, some of which has piled into drifts much higher than that.  Schools and offices have closed, and the Provincial Police have suggested that people who do not absolutely need to be on the roads should just stay home.

Snowstorm

Luckily, all that snow has so far missed us here, three hours east of London.  We will most certainly get a major winter storm sooner or later, however — the kind that children love and adults (the ones who have to get to work) dread.

Under the circumstances, what could prove a more perfect way to spend a snowed-in afternoon than settling down with Snowstorm from games company Family Pastimes?  Players help one another (Snowstorm, like all the products from Family Pastimes, is a cooperative game) to plough the snow, run their errands, and get safely home again.  This game was always a hit with our own children on wintry afternoons (although I always seemed to be the one who cleared the snow!)  Ages 5+, up to eight players.  In stock now.  CAD$14.99

A New Game to Check(er) Out

Arlekino

Okay, it’s a pun — Arlekino is a simplified spelling of the Italian word “arlecchino”, which means “harlequin”, or jester, in English.  Arlekino is also the name of the newest game from designer Bernard Tavitian, a Frenchman who holds a Master’s degree in Mathematics and a doctorate in Biophysics.  His previous smash-hit game was Blokus, a deceptively simple game of strategy for four players whose straightforward rules but engaging variability made it endlessly replayable.

Arlekino is brand new, having been introduced formally to the gaming world at this year’s Internationale Spieltage SPIEL (known familiarly as Essen, after the German city in which it is held annually during the month of October).

The rules are elegantly simple:  two to four players each choose one colour of four (green, yellow, red, blue).  The 36 game pieces — 35 of which display either one solid colour or a combination of two or three colours — are arranged at random on the board, so that each game is different.  Each player, on his turn, plays with a piece containing at least one section of his colour and tries to eliminate pieces with his opponents’ colours.  If the piece contains more than one section of his colour, the player may move the piece more than once, by moving it to an adjacent square or by jumping over an opponent’s piece.  Pieces jumped are removed from the board.

The game ends when no player can make a legal move.  The player whose colour is dominant on the board (by counting up the coloured segments on the pieces) wins the game.

Simple, yes.  Easy to win?  No.  Like all good games, Arlekino asks the player to make lots of decisions  — none of which has a straightforwardly correct answer — and the decisions made by the three other players will also have an impact on the evolution of the game.  This means that even young children can develop quickly into very good players, so that kindly parents, sitting down for a quick game, may soon find themselves fighting desperately to avoid a humiliating defeat at the hands of a nine-year-old.

In stock now.  CAD$34.99